The Politics of Wine in Britain
April 22, 2013
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12581821-the-politics-of-wine-in-britain The Politics of Wine in Britain: Power and Taste, 1649-1860 by Charles Ludington A unique…
Chad Ludington
Chad Ludington, research interests have focused on the connections between political culture, political thought, and material culture in England, Scotland, and Ireland (c. 1500 to c. 1860) in a European and Atlantic context. He has published works on the history of British and Irish political thought, the Huguenot Diaspora in Ireland, and the political meanings and uses of wine in England and Scotland. He recently completed his first book, The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He argue that the taste for wine, meaning what wine one consumed and how one consumed it, was an expression of political beliefs (and therefore party allegiance), competing conceptions of masculinity, social class, and social aspirations. Consequently, the taste for wine both reflected and helped to construct political power. As well as being a major study of political culture during the very time the British state was being created, his book is a methodological attempt to move beyond the years of theorizing about “New Cultural History,” and actually to write it. Thus, his book endeavors to reconcile the materialist insights of social historians of the previous generation and the dexterous decoding of language, cultural practices, and material objects that is the distinguishing feature of more recent cultural history. His current research interests include a comparative study of foodways and attitudes about food in Britain and France in the period c. 1500-c. 1900, and changing ideas about the meaning of liberty in Britain from 1688 to 1860. He has taught courses on the intersection of English, Scottish, and Irish history in the period 1400-1707, the rise and fall of liberalism and the British Empire since 1688, early-modern European intellectual history, Europe from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, Europe from the Industrial and French Revolutions to the present, and the history of food and drink in Europe, in the United States, and in a global setting.
-
Read more
